Mixed Signals, the leading provider of digital content monitoring solutions, will demonstrate the advanced audio monitoring capabilities of its award-winning Sentry® digital content monitoring solution at next week’s annual Winter Conference of CableLabs®, the research and development consortium for the cable television industry. Mixed Signals worked closely with major television industry leaders to create its audio monitoring solution, which enables service providers and broadcasters to identify loudness issues in programming and commercials, giving them the critical information necessary to quickly fix dramatic volume changes that occur during channel changes and when commercials run.

Sentry’s new audio monitoring capabilities are particularly timely as legislation before Congress will require video service providers to ensure that ads be no louder than the programs they accompany. The Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act has already been approved by the House of Representatives and is now with the Senate, where passage is expected. Unless the industry can implement a viable solution for addressing loud commercials, it is feared that Congress will task the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) with specifying a solution that operators must adopt regardless of cost or complexity.

Mixed Signals has upgraded Sentry specifically for monitoring audio level issues in the multi-channel cable environment. Complementing its existing ability to continually monitor hundreds of channels simultaneously, Sentry now supports the ITU-R BS.1770 audio specification for monitoring program loudness. Developed by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the BS.1770 specification is shortly expected to be adopted by the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) here in the U.S., which in turn will lead to its use by broadcasters and then cable and other multi-channel video service providers. Operators already using Sentrys can easily add support for BS.1770 via a software upgrade.

“The first step in ensuring that commercials air at the same volume as the programs they accompany is to actually identify overly loud commercials, which can be a daunting task for service providers who deliver hundreds if not thousands of channels of programming,” said Eric Conley, CEO of Mixed Signals. “Sentry gives operators the capabilities they need to find the loud commercials in all of their programming and to do so in a cost-effective and scalable fashion.”

About Sentry Sentry is a comprehensive content monitoring solution for cable, telecom, IPTV and other video service providers. Sentry enables the early detection, diagnosis and repair of video and audio errors (i.e., video freeze, macro-blocking, loss of audio, etc.) whenever or wherever they occur in the network, so service providers can deliver services with excellent quality, thus ensuring an optimal quality of experience (QoE) for subscribers. Sentry accomplishes this through its unique combination of unprecedented visibility into network anomalies at the IP and MPEG layers, scalability to monitor every program in the network and its real-time, 24/7 operation. Sentry is proven in deployments with service providers worldwide, including nine of the top 10 U.S. cable operators.

About Mixed Signals Mixed Signals provides the most comprehensive and scalable digital content monitoring solutions from the source to the edge including digital services, transport streams, ad insertion, switched digital video, video on demand and interactive content. Mixed Signals’ innovative products offer unparalleled visibility into video streams and digital services in real time. The Company’s products are known for their ease of use and deliver critical intelligence about overall network transport stream behavior, trending analyses, and actionable alerts when anomalies are detected. More than any other product on the market today, Mixed Signals monitoring solutions enable cable and satellite television operators, broadcasters, content aggregators and IPTV providers to simplify deployments of new services and applications, and to future-proof and maximize the return on the investment in their digital networks.